even an Apple MacBook Pro. Average North Koreans are also shown using cell phones. Kim Jong Il encouraged the development and use of technology, even though at first he feared the potential for outside information to seep in through it and threaten the status quo and regime propaganda. His son has no such fear of technology and its place in the modern world but demonstrably understands its opportunities and its power to amplify his control over his people. This attitude is certainly an acknowledgment that the regime recognizes the irreversible forces of the market economy, by using modern tools to allow horizontal connections among North Koreans rather than tamp them down. As InterMedia, a Washington-based research group, documented in its important 2017 study, “Expanding network connectivity to a broad swath of the population is arming the North Korean government with a new array of censorship and surveillance tools that go beyond what is observed even in other authoritarian states or closed media environments.” In effect, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea is “conducting more active strategic management of the information space,” which is intended to “meet its surveillance and security needs, as well as spur economic growth, and create the appearance of development and modernization,” according to the study.
North Koreans were no strangers to technology. After all, ownership of televisions, VCRs, and DVDs had begun to spread since around 2000. InterMedia found in 2012 that nearly three-quarters of surveyed North Koreans had watched television and about half personally owned one. According to a UNICEF study, nearly 100 percent of households owned a television by 2017. Based on his research of the borderland areas, the North Korea expert Andrei Lankov asserted that 70 to 80 percent of all households had DVD players by 2012. But as mentioned earlier, most North Koreans, not just the elites, now own or have access to advanced media devices, including computers, USB drives, and Chinese mobile phones. Lankov estimates that there are probably several hundred thousand computers in North Korea. Mobile devices are more common, with as many as four million subscriptions and growing.
The cell phones and tablets that North Koreans rely on for information, leisure, and conducting business activities are enabled with minimal 3G services, according to the research group Recorded Future, including voice, text messaging, and picture and video messaging capabilities. A New York Times reporter who visited Pyongyang in 2016 recounted a scene at a restaurant near Kim Il Sung University in which young couples used their North Korea–made smartphones, running a version of the Android operating system, to take photos of their hamburgers before eating, a scene that would be unremarkable in any other country. But it was remarkable in North Korea, even more so because of the casualness of the Pyongyangites’ flaunting of their consumer goods and the accoutrements of modern, digital society, not to mention their appetite for a staple of American menus. These phones are not cheap—a cell phone and registration costs around $200, an exorbitant sum in North Korea—but their prevalence is another reminder of North Korea’s marketization and wealth creation since the post-famine years. The journalists Daniel Tudor and James Pearson point out that for North Koreans a cell phone is both a necessity and a status symbol: Traders need it to get information on prices and connect with suppliers and potential customers; young people use it to impress friends and highlight their position in society. UNICEF found that more than 80 percent of North Koreans have used a mobile phone as of 2017.
Yet their experience with these devices is vastly different from ours. The conventional wisdom about the potential for the Internet and related technology to open new—and unfettered—spaces for communication simply does not apply. Suki Kim, who taught elite North Korean students in Pyongyang, observed that the teenagers did not know anything about the revolution in information and social networking as pioneered by the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Martyn Williams, a technology specialist, explains how Kim’s regime “is doing something that no other country has done: building a nationwide intranet that offers email and websites but is totally shut off from the rest of the world. It’s an audacious attempt to usher in some of the benefits of electronic communications while maintaining complete control on an entire population.”
North Korea doesn’t just rely on censorship to block content; it has created an alternate virtual universe. The country’s network, called Kwangmyong, allows its users to access domestic websites that are limited to content